WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Early in Richard Nelson’s clinical new production of Turgenev’s “Month in the Country,” one character says waspishly to her platonic lover, “You love observing people, picking them apart, rummaging around in them ...” It’s a fair definition of everybody else onstage: These folks just can’t stop dissecting one another’s behavior and motives and affectations.

Even when they’re not actively participating in conversations and confrontations, the residents of the Russian country estate at which Turgenev’s anxiously languorous drama takes place are visible on the sidelines. They’re seated in chairs in full view of the audience, and you suspect that they’re taking mental notes on how their friends are coming across. And we, the theatergoers, in our own chairs, become a further link in the analytic chain: we’re people watching people watching people.

Those who attend this Williamstown Theater Festival production, which runs on the Main Stage through Aug. 19, may feel that they’ve dropped in on a session at the Actors Studio, the fabled New York workshop where psyches are taken apart in the pursuit of emotional truth. Mr. Nelson — who not only directed this play but also, with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, wrote the new translation — invites such comparisons in his program notes.

Hoping to rejuvenate a play that had rarely been successfully performed onstage, he writes, he was inspired by accounts of an early-20th-century production by the Moscow Arts Theater, directed by the titanic, prodigiously influential acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky.

In attempting to replicate that effect, Mr. Nelson has pared down what is usually presented as a sumptuous costume drama to an austerity that evokes the spartan set of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Takeshi Kata’s scenery consists of little more than wooden chairs and tables, which the performers rearrange to suit the scene. Susan Hilferty’s costumes seem to be of the play’s place and period (Russia in the 1840s), but they are also as simple as everyday, second-best work clothes.

The proscenium stage has been extended to thrust into the audience, heightening the sense that we are one with the cast members. Only Japhy Weideman’s lighting, somber and dispassionate, seems to separate us from them.

As for the performers, they are mostly young, subdued and very, very serious. And as they act out Turgenev’s tale of restless, listless people playing at love and derailing lives, they rarely raise their voices or unfurrow their brows. It’s as if the psychological exploration they are engaged in were as grave and delicate an enterprise as smashing atoms.

This is a brave approach to a play in which boredom is the defining element through which the characters move. (In writing a play that presents ennui as an existential condition and a national epidemic, Turgenev anticipated Chekhov by half a century.) And no one makes much pretense that the situation is otherwise.

Photo

Jessica Collins in a scene from "A Month in the Country."Credit
T. Charles Erickson

“Can boredom be hidden? Everything else ... but not boredom.” That line is said by Mikhail Rakitin (an intense, soft-spoken Jeremy Strong), who has a pedant’s habit of answering his own questions. Mikhail, an eternal houseguest, is in residence at the home of his prosperous friend Arkady Islaev (Louis Cancelmi). He is also inconveniently in love with his host’s wife, the alluring and capricious Natalya (Jessica Collins).

She in turn is dangerously enamored of the student Alexei Belyaev (Julian Cihi), who is tutoring her son, Kolya (Parker Bell-Devaney). Unfortunately, Alexei is also loved by Natalya’s 17-year-old ward, Vera (Charlotte Bydwell), who is being sought in marriage by a rich but dimwitted landowner (Paul Anthony McGrane). I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that despite these teeming passions, not so much as a kiss is exchanged (unless you count hand kissing) before the end.

It is Natalya, with her ever-changing whims and stormy temperament, who makes this isolated, drifting world go around and finally spins it off its axis. The part has been an understandable draw for majestic actresses, and Natalya has shown up on Broadway in the formidable persons of Alla Nazimova, Uta Hagen and Helen Mirren.

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But as Mr. Nelson points out, Turgenev’s script specifies that Natalya is only 29. And so he has cast Ms. Collins, who looks as if she might still be carded at bars. Of course the point is that Natalya feels old, whatever her age. And you can imagine how an amusing performance might emerge from the contrast between a palpably young woman and her exaggerated, grande dame world-weariness.

Ms. Collins’s performance, whatever its virtues, is not amusing. She plays Natalya with the pinched, fretful air of a studious college sophomore facing a physics final. And like her fellow cast members, she keeps her voice mostly at a low, droning, dying pitch, as if boredom were a terminal disease. When Natalya erupts into joy or anger, the audience laughs, because it’s such a jolting contrast to her normal demeanor.

You can feel Ms. Collins and the rest of the cast burrowing inside themselves, trying to summon authentic feelings and then bring them to the surface quietly. And in some of the one-on-one encounters — between the young Ms. Bydwell and Mr. Cihi, or between Sean Cullen as a scheming doctor and Elisabeth Waterston as a paid companion — there’s a credible, in-the-moment emotional flow.

Yet these vignettes felt like exercises from a scene-study class, and I never had a sense of their relating to the larger world of the play or feeding its momentum. The performers may have laid down the psychological groundwork for their roles. But aside from Kate Kearney-Patch in the small role of Arkady’s mother, they have yet to turn them into flesh-and-blood characters.

Like it or not, people do have outsides as well as insides. And whether an actor starts from within or without, you usually have to have both. It’s the friction between the two that creates exciting acting.

As one of this country’s most probing and subtle playwrights (“Goodnight Children Everywhere,”“Sweet and Sad”) and as a director of his own work, Mr. Nelson has provided lovingly assembled showcases for such friction, in which people’s exactly detailed exteriors clash with their passions and aspirations.

Perhaps in his zeal to find the true core of a play he felt had been long misinterpreted, he stripped down his production too far. I suppose you could say, charitably, that it has a certain transparency of feeling. But without anchoring surface quirks and physical details of character, transparency comes dangerously close to invisibility.

A version of this review appears in print on August 11, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Group Psychoanalysis On a Russian Estate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe